Conduit
by PepperjackCandy
Summary: AU, Gen, Whitfic. It's 2003. While out on a mission, Whitney suffers a mishap which will change his life.


Title: Conduit   
Author: PepperjackCandy   
Rating: PG-13 (for language)   
Pairing: None   
Category: Futurefic, AU   
Spoilers for: Assorted Season 1 eps  
  
Disclaimer: I own nothing Smallville-related, or related in any other way to Clark Kent, Superman or any of the various creations of the wonderful folks at DC Comics.   
  
Feedback: Always welcome, either by e-mail or using the review system at   
  
A/N: Look! A completely gen fic!  
  
I don't know the first thing about the military, particularly not the Marines. Please forgive me for any errors in protocol, titles, etc.  
  
Visage has, as I'm sure you can appreciate, disappeared into a black hole.   
  
This is an offshoot of the Honestyverse. Yes, it will reunite with the rest of the stories later, like around 2009 or so (their time, not ours, hopefully!)  
  
Why yes, I did start this for Livia's X-Files Title Challenge. Why do you ask? 8-)  
  
=======  
  
March 2003  
  
Whitney's platoon had been sent on a humanitarian mission to Bialya, which had been hit by an earthquake. His lieutenant was dispatching the men in his platoon into the damaged buildings in a small town.   
  
Whitney had already rescued a little girl named Traya, orphaned and alone. Then his Lieutenant sent him into one of the most-damaged buildings in the town.  
  
Whitney walked through the building, breathing a sigh of relief at every empty room he encountered. He'd made it through the building to the back staircase, then up to the second story. Certain that this building had been evacuated, he came back down the stairs and was halfway back to the door when the next tremor hit.  
  
Whitney never lost consciousness, although in the hours that followed, he wished he had. The second story and roof came down on top of him. He felt every board, every beam, every chunk of plaster as it hit him.  
  
And once he was flattened under the debris, he could feel a stabbing, grinding pain in his right leg. It didn't feel like it had when he'd broken it at football camp five years earlier; but there was no time to analyze the pain. He had to figure out how to shift the debris and get out. He began to try to move it, tugging at some pieces, pushing at others.   
  
An indeterminate length of time and two mini-collapses later, Whitney realized that he had been mistaken. He had nothing but time to analyze the pain.   
  
_They'll be here soon. I know they will. It's just a matter of time._  
  
An hour later, he was still thinking the same thing. By now it was darker under his pile of rubble and the nerves in his leg had finally thrown up their hands and admitted defeat in the face of the pain.  
  
_Now that my leg's gone numb, at least I can concentrate on something else now. Like getting out of here._  
  
He returned to trying to move the weight above him, but from his prone position, he couldn't get any leverage.  
  
_Damn darkness! Damn debris! Damn, damn, damn . . . . Ouch! Fucking splinter!_  
  
Suddenly, there was a blinding flash of green light and the debris was lifted off of him as if by an invisible hand.  
  
Whitney looked up from his position on the ground to find several of his fellow platoon members standing just beyond the periphery of the damaged building, looking down at him.  
  
"Fordman! You all right?"   
  
Whitney nodded. "Just . . . give me a second." He knew that his leg wasn't broken, so he figured once he could get his legs under him, he'd be able to stand.  
  
Shakily, he sat up, shifting onto his left hip.  
  
He got up on his left knee, his right leg still dangling behind him.  
  
Levering himself up with his hands, he put all of his weight on his left leg and stood, bringing his right leg into position and redistributing his weight.   
  
He crumpled to the ground with a cry of pain.  
  
Immediately, two of the platoon members crowded around him, supporting his weight between them.  
  
"We didn't want to leave you there, so we were waiting for one of the engineers to come back from the base and tell us which of those beams were safe to move. Sarge said that one wrong move could crush you."  
  
"That's all right. I'm fine." Whitney tried to stand under his own power again, and his knee gave out.  
  
Whitney wasn't fine.  
  
They stabilized him the best they could in the overcrowded field hospital and forwarded him on to the local civilian hospital for further treatment.  
  
The civilian hospital was swarming with patients, professionals, staff and visitors come to pick up family members, and, when necessary, identify bodies. The earthquake had caused quite a lot of damage, so there was no room to treat him there.   
  
They airlifted him to the airport, where a military transport was waiting to take him to the closest United States military base that had its own hospital, in Turkey.  
  
Apparently they knew to expect him, because they wheeled him immediately into a room, where a white-lab-coated doctor was up to see him in minutes. "Lance Corporal Fordman?"   
  
"Yes."  
  
"I'm Doctor Halliwell. I'm your radiologist. I'll be conducting your MRI."  
  
"MRI?"  
  
"Magnetic Resonance Imaging. It's a non-invasive procedure we'll be using to see what's going on inside your knee."  
  
Dr. Halliwell's tone concerned Whitney. "Sounds bad."  
  
Dr. Halliwell kept his voice neutral. "We won't know until we get the pictures back. A few questions. Do you have any metal implants?"  
  
"Fillings?"  
  
"That's fine. Have you ever been shot?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Do you have any tattoos?"  
  
Whitney gestured to his upper arm.  
  
"That might get a little warm, but it should be fine." Dr. Halliwell assured him. "I'll go down to radiology and see what the schedule looks like. We should have an opening available soon, and I'll send an orderly up to get you."  
  
Whitney used the remote to flip on the television, but besides news channels and canned hospital announcements, all that was on were Turkish soap operas.   
  
Minutes later, an orderly came in, "Lance Corporal Fordman?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"I'm going to take you down to radiology. You ready?" Not waiting for a response, the burly other man unlocked the bed's brakes and wheeled it away to radiology.  
  
Two hours later, Whitney had returned to his room and was eating his dinner, such as it was, when Dr. Halliwell came in, "Would you like me to come back later?" He asked.  
  
Whitney hurriedly swallowed his bite of food and responded, "No. I want to hear what's going on with my leg."  
  
"The news isn't as bad as it might be, but it definitely could be better. You've torn four ligaments on your knee."  
  
Whitney swallowed, hard. "What does that mean?"  
  
"Well, it means that you'll need surgery, and then you'll need some time to recover. After the surgery, we'll probably send you back to . . . Kansas, is it?" "Yes, sir," Whitney nodded. "Smallville. Then what?"  
  
The doctor sighed. "Then we wait to see if your knee recovers enough for you to return to active service."  
  
Whitney really thought he was prepared for those words. Instead, he felt his heart drop clean through the floor as it hit him that once again, his planned future was ending.  
  
"Well, if you can't return, I'm sure you'll get an honorable discharge. I hear you saved the life of a little girl."  
  
"Yeah. Well, it wasn't any big deal."  
  
"It was. You were the only one in your platoon to find any survivors. I can't promise anything, but you might get a commendation for it."  
  
Whitney tried to feel good about it, he really did; after all, he'd gone into the service with hopes of becoming a hero. All he could feel, though, was disappointment, "Will that help me pay for college?" He asked bitterly.  
  
"You'll be entitled to one month of benefits for each month you were in the service."  
  
"Great. 22 months. That'll get me to what? My sophomore year of college?"   
  
"I'm sorry about that, Lance Corporal Fordman, but . . . ," the doctor stopped speaking when his cell phone rang. He glanced at it, "Damn. I'm running late for a meeting. I'll bring the surgeon around tomorrow morning to talk to you about your surgery."  
  
"Thanks, Doctor Halliwell."  
  
After Doctor Halliwell left, Whitney picked at his food some more, but he'd lost his appetite. He pushed the tray aside, noticing a box on his nightstand that had some of his personal effects in it -- his dog tags, a pair of sunglasses, the chain from Lana's necklace. . .  
  
He picked up the chain. Sure enough, the stone was gone.  
  
_Damn it! Oh, well, at least I'm not going to have to explain it to her when I see her again,_ he threw the chain into the wastebasket by his bed.  
  
He reached up to feel the space between his clavicles where the stone used to lie, then felt it again. There was a distinct lump under his skin. For one heart-stopping moment, he thought it was a tumor, but then he recognized the solid, octahedral shape. _The meteor rock from Lana's necklace? Was it shoved under there in the collapse?_  
  
Startled, his brain tried to get out of his bed, but his knee fought back. "Argh!" he yelled in pain as he fell back onto the bed.  
  
"Shit!" He grabbed the cover from his dinner plate, holding it up like a warped mirror. A warped mirror with a hole in the middle, but if he tilted it just . . . right, he could see the lump. And it sure did look like the rock from Lana's necklace, only there was no scar. No sign at all of something burrowing beneath his skin. It looked like his body had produced the stone.  
  
Suddenly, Whitney remembered the flash of green light the moment before he was rescued. Whitney was neither blind nor as stupid as everyone thought he was; he pressed a hand against the tattoo on his right shoulder. The tattoo made from meteor rocks.  
  
_A truck passed right through me. I walked through walls. Then there was Sean, freezing people, and that fat chick, and, oh, God, me._  
  
"Lance Corporal Fordman?"  
  
"Yes?"  
  
A nurse came into the room. "I'm here to pick up your tray, and to ask if you need anything to help you sleep tonight."  
  
It took every bit of strength Whitney had not to touch the stone at the base of his throat. "Yes. Please."  
  
Whitney woke the next morning as Doctor Halliwell came in, accompanied by a smaller man, who looked Indian to Whitney.  
  
"Corporal Fordman, this is Doctor Patel. He'll be your surgeon."  
  
"I've been looking at your MRI," Doctor Patel said in a disconcertingly Midwestern accent, "and we need to get you into surgery as soon as we can. And even then, I'm not entirely sure that one surgery will do it. You may always walk with a limp, Lance Corporal Fordman."  
  
Whitney sighed, his attention drawn away from the stone embedded in his throat for a moment, "Do whatever you have to do."  
  
Less than a week later, Whitney was home. He'd officially been told that he was being given an honorable discharge. He planned to start school in the fall, if his knee was well enough by then.  
  
He woke from a restless sleep to a terrible, shooting pain in his knee. He formed a nonverbal wish for the pain to stop, and a bright beam of green light shot from the base of his throat to his knee. Suddenly the pain was gone. He flexed his knee experimentally; to his surprise, that didn't hurt either.  
  
Carefully he levered himself off of the sofa, putting his weight first on his left leg, then his right. There was no pain, but his knee buckled under his weight.  
  
"Jesus!" He yelled as he practically threw himself down.   
  
His heart pounding, he realized that he had, or could have, conscious control over the stone. He could cause the kinds of mutations that he'd heard about, like the girl who impersonated him to get to Lana.   
  
He just had to work out how to control it, and then his future was secured. 


End file.
